I was in the middle of another post when I read Mole's latest. I've been meaning to address this racial thing for a long time now since it is a topic we have written about copiously over at culturekitchen.

Contrary to some politicians ... ahem ... I remember my degrees quite well. I have an MPhil (which is like an ABD or an almost-PHD) from New York University's Spanish and Portuguese department. Eventhough my graduate work was officially in Latin American Literature, my work was heavily dosed in post-structuralist philosophy. Actually, almost all my work there was in post-structuralist theory --which is why I ended up focusing in on the obscure topic of the Neobaroque literary movement happening all across Latin America and Latino US at the time.

My post-structuralist background colors my views of identity. Post-structuralists, being the philosophical children of Freddy Nietszche, don't believe in "the essence of being". We look at identity not as a thing you are but a set of practices and social interactions. We use the evidences of perspective to prove that being changes based on who you're with and what you do.

But it would be all really nice if it all were about just 'being' and not about power. Unfortunately nobody can escape the will to power.

Race and multiculturalism are part of a social, political and economic matrix that uses biology as an excuse for the acquiring, trading and unleashing of power. The color of one's skin or culture has very little to do with race and ethnicity. And as much as people would like to believe there is no power in being colored, that's also a lie.

I should now.

As many doors have been closed and opened to me due to my being a Puerto Rican, physically 'black' woman. I have found both power and powerlessness on my ethnicity and 'race'. As I said to a panel on local political blogging over at BlogHer : My being not just a Puerto Rican woman but a self-identified Puerto Rican birracial woman gives me the power to publish about topics my 'white' counterparts would never touch. Before any major local newspapers or local bloggers did so, we wrote about DC-11 from the point of view of race and its consequences to the balance of racial power in Congress.

My minority status gave me the privilege to publish about these things. Isn't that ironic? Well, no. Power is a matrix. Race, sex, culture, gender, capital, politics : They are all but elements of the matrix of power. Power, much to the chagrin to many, is not as black and white as they'd like it to be.

I think the most personally emblematic post I have written about the subject is Black Mother, White Child; although my relative claim to blogging fame is for my now infamous post involving Condoleeza Rice.

Most posts we've written at culturekitchen, though, are from a political or sociological perspective.

One thing that separates me from many feminist bloggers is my considerations about race when speaking about women's rights. There are no women's rights without social justice. There are too many issues of social justice to contend with in this country for me to say that women's issues trump other issues. There can't be a hierarchy of causes when you're fighting for social justice. Which is why I wrote Rape, torture, sex and social justice.

Better than anything I could have written is one of my early co-horts' work. Race and Multicultural politics is the reason why I pleaded Jeff Langstraat to join culturekitchen. Jeff absolutely knocks it out of the park with this post and I urge people to read it to understand where I come from when I say race is a political construct that has everything to do with power and very little to do with biology.

From Race and Multicultural politics:

One of multiculturalism's biggest flaws is that it substitutes culture for race. It maintains a form of racial essentialism and transfers that into a cultural particularity. It links culture to body. More specifically, it links particular cultures to particular bodies.

Before I move forward with the argument, I'd better do some definitional work. "Race" and "Culture" are such loaded terms, so full of multiple meanings, so fraught with potential misunderstanding and miscommunication. Here's what I'm talking about.

When I speak of race, I'm not talking about skin color. Skin color (and other biological features deemed relevant) is a marker of race. Race is a system of social classification and organization. It's a system of power. It's relational (races exist only in relation to each other). Skin color is both the determinant of place in these systems and the shorthand we use to denote them.

Culture is not content. We often reify culture; we turn it into a thing. Culture becomes the songs, books, movies, dances, etc. particular to a social group. It becomes discrete. That's a common, and partially legitimate view, but it's far too limited when compared to the definition I want to use. When I talk about culture I'm talking about process. It's the ongoing (re)production of meaning and social life. We enact it and create artifacts, but those are only snapshots in time, the products of social life at that moment. Because it is social, it is interactive. It is constantly in motion. It is never pure. Members of groups interact with each other, and with members of other groups, fairly regularly. These interactions always carry the potential for intermixture, for hybridity: something new from two (or more) other sources, both yet neither at once. All cultures contain some aspect of this. Culture-as-thing sets up artificial boundaries around culture that cannot hold.

I don't take discussions about race or ethnicity lightly. I wish I could be snarky about them most of the time but when you walk around with more melanin that most of your neighbors, shit and life happen differently.

With that in mind I want to bring up something that seems to be escaping some in the discussions around CD-11 and about which Jeff, again, wrote so eloquently:

In a world of proliferating shades and phenotypic mixtures, ideas of racial specificity cannot hold.

The elaboration of this argument always leads to a question that sounds something like this: "In this move to get rid of race, aren't you trying to take away my identity, my history, my family's struggle to survive and overcome?" I would say no. What I'm trying to get rid of is the system. That memory of suffering and survival is a testament to the necessity of destroying the system that produced it.

A rethinking of culture and race in this interactive and relational form moves us away from essentialized identities that separate and into the possibility of coalition across difference. It requires other lines of solidarity, though.

In order to get rid of the pettiness of racial and multicultural politics, we have to stop electing officials who fan the flames of tribalism and racial divisiveness as a way to not deal with the more pressing issues of social and economic displacement of whole communities. You can't expect politicians to truly address issues of economic disempowerement across all levels of our society if you don't elect them in the first place.

Who in the CD-11 race is the one person who would go beyond race to speak truth to power? Who is the guy or gal who would cut the crap of multiculti-politics and fight for social justice and economic empowerment of all peoples? Who is the one person in that primary who would not sell out as a cheap whore to the corporate interests of predatory developers?

Answer that question and you'll find the person who will be better suited to ending the crapulence of race politics in that district. Answer these questions for all candidates and we will find the true progressives.

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